Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

These were the most heartbreaking: the poor dumb beasts whose torment was made more pitiful by their lack of faculty to understand it.

How I wished I could have been there! To have been a man grown, advancing in that battle line, mowing down in fair fight the men of Argos, as they had cut down by perfidy my own mother and father.

I had seen my own heart and it was the heart of a coward.

“You have never tasted freedom, friend,” Dienekes spoke, “or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.”

know that no matter what feat of valor the gods permit me to perform, I will never be his equal. This is my secret. What keeps me humble.”

It was for him, to teach him, to make him eat the thousandth bitter lesson of the ten thousand more he would endure before they hardened him into the rock the city demanded and allowed him to take his place as an Equal and a warrior.

Define the word “mercy.” Define “compassion.” Are these the virtues of war or of peace? Of men or of women? Are they virtues at all?

Polynikes’ courage was that of a lion or an eagle, something in the blood and the marrow, which summoned itself out of its own preeminence, without thought, and gloried in its instinctual supremacy.

Dienekes’ courage was different. His was the virtue of a man, a fallible mortal, who brought valor forth out of the understanding of his heart, by the force of some inner integrity which was unknown to Polynikes.

“War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in a man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity all which is base and ignoble.

“Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.”

None speaks the truth whole to a king, not His own brother, not even you, my friend and kinsman.”

Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack.”

“When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life’s preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime.

“The opposite of fear,” Dienekes said, “is love.”

will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.

“I am sorry for them,” he avowed, indicating the valiant foemen who stood so proximately across. “What wouldn’t they give, the noblest among them, to stand here with us now?”

I chose them not for their own valor, lady, but for that of their women.’